Preparing school counselors for social justice group counseling: Examining, power, privilege, and intersectionality

Given the sociopolitical climate of schools today and multiple crises, school counselors are poised to center healing engagement, antiracist education, and social emotional learning through group counseling. Therefore, counselor education programs must prepare and train social justice-engaged school counselors with advanced group knowledge and skills to fuel the success of all P-12 schools. This manuscript specifically explores the extent to which school counselors use the lens of power, privilege, and intersectionality within the screening, planning, implementation, and evaluation of small groups. Results indicate while school counselors are facilitating small group counseling, contradictions exist in training and school counselors’ implementation of small groups from the lens of power, privilege, and intersectionality to promote social justice and antiracist practices in schools. School counselors perceive they were trained in small group counseling from the lens of power, privilege, and intersectionality, however, they reported that they do not implement group counseling from the same lens.